It's outrageously low. They're also fancifully assuming cpu tdp = electrical power, cooling = 0w, and another 0w to the motherboard/network cards. And each box has 1 non-redundant, schmuck-grade $80 psu, as well as a consumer grade mobo. This would never be anywhere near their uptime.

CPU TDP is accounted for, the CPU linked in the blog post draws 65w and that is used in the electricity calculations.

I did realize that I completely forgot about RAM, when I get back to a computer I'll have to make some updates, but it won't materially move the numbers, there's 33% margin of error between the number in the spreadsheet and $2 / TB / Mo.

The $80 PSU is what I could link to from Newegg, I do have experience in industrial electronics, and I know from firsthand experience that you can buy a 10+year PSU at 93% efficiency for well under $80 at 300 watts. At that level, you're going to be able to request all the required cabling as well, which means you're getting a much better price than the $7 per cable linked in the post.

95% uptime means 18 days of downtime per year. Consumer grade PSUs and mobos do much better than that.

You included tdp but tdp /= actual electrical power. Intel approximates it from base clock (practically all consumer motherboards ignore the tdp/boost spec). AMD uses voodoo to calculate tdp, it's a pure marketing number with no basis in power usage. To make matters worse, motherboards typically go nuts with voltage on consumer boards, and power draw can vary wildly depending on what instructions you're using. There are a crap load of x86-64 extensions.

Yes, you forgot ram. And network chips, motherboard power delivery losses, motherboard power usage, cabling losses, etc. I'd guess it would total 50-100w, but feel free to current clamp the psu rails to get a realistic number.

As for the 95% uptime, I agree with you. I wasn't considering how much breathing room that actually provides, I was just going with my instincts.

Assembling computers and replacing drives is generally speaking unskilled labor, right there next to factory workers.

Right, the people putting together servers for Dell or HP certainly are not getting paid $20 or $25/hr. If your standard of quality is "crypto shitbox", even $10/hr seems more than enough. This is assuming that many of these storage farms are going to be in places like Vietnam or Romania, not the US or Germany.

If you're from the USA, perhaps just ×2 any price you read if that helps you get through the article. Work that needs doing doesn't always need to be done in high-income/high CoL places.

I earn about €26/h before taxes in western Europe, an income which lets me live in relative luxury (not "private jet" luxury, but I literally do anything I want and still save more than a third of my income with a 36-hour work week), and that's for security consultancy which is way more specialised than the job you're talking about. I think it's also above the national average, but I don't have the statistics on hand. Not sure what the cost to the company is, I think they put in another hundred a month for health insurance or pension or something (they pay 50% and I pay 50%, though I don't see why keeping 50% off my payslip helps anyone, an employer will just deduct that from the salary they can offer) plus some overhead for accounting and whatever, but it's probably not that far off.

I don't think they mean engineer time here - it's assembling the servers, so technicians, and yeah I guess yeah like most people they aren't paid like in-demand software engineers. This is how most people have to get to by!

In some developed countries you can get qualified labor that cheap. For example in Southern or Eastern Europe. Not to mention developing countries of course.

Not to mention, this work isn't technical in nature. It's very quick to pick up, probably more so than landscaping tbh.